Italian
police have swooped on a Mafia clan in Sicily, arresting dozens in an
international operation to dismember a powerful crime group run by women.

More
than 500 officers took part in the raid on the Laudani clan in Catania,
nicknamed "Mussi di ficurinia" ("Prickly Pear Lips"), in a
sting that involved forces in Germany and the Netherlands, Italian police said.

Three
women, known as the "three queens of Caltagirone" — a town near the
Sicilian port of Catania — had ruled the group with an iron grip, but were
brought down by the heir to the clan who began helping police.

The
suspects were all wanted for Mafia association, extortion, drug trafficking and
possessing illegal arms.

Of
109 arrest warrants issued on Wednesday, 80 people were detained, 23 were
already serving time in prison and six are still eluding capture, police said.

Giuseppe
Laudani was selected to run the clan when he was 17, after his Mafia boss
father was killed.

He
turned to the police and told how the three women, Maria Scuderi, 51, Concetta
Scalisi, 60, and Paola Torrisi, 52, had raised him.

Known
as "the prince", he described a world of violence and vendettas.

Torrisi,
daughter of a mobster boss who used to manage the clan's international drug
trading, was still young when she began to organise couriers in the area around
Mount Etna, the active volcano which dominates Catania.

Mr
Laudani was also a police informer on his brother Pippo and half-brother
Alberto Caruso, as well as his grandfather Sebastiano Laudini, 90, who had
served time between 1986 and 2012 and is now back under house arrest.

According
to prosecutor Michelangelo Patane, the clan, which had sought ties with the cocaine-running
'Ndrangheta mafia in Calabria, had a huge arsenal of weapons, including two
bazookas.

The
rocket launchers were intended for use in hits on several Sicilian magistrates,
but the plan was foiled when another informer told police the weapons were
hidden in a garage on the slopes of Mount Etna.

The
Laudanis are believed to be behind a string of violent attacks in the 1990s,
including the murder of a prison warden and a lawyer.

Police
said they had been hampered in their investigations by local business owners,
who either lied about being the victims of attempts to extort money from them
or admitted the extortion but refused to help identify those responsible.

The
Sicilian Mafia, known as "Cosa Nostra" or "Our Thing", was
Italy's most powerful organised crime syndicate in the 1980s and 1990s, but has
seen its power diminish following years of probes and mass arrests.

It
also faces fierce underworld competition from the increasingly powerful
Naples-based Camorra and Calabria's 'Ndrangheta.